Due to the significant rise of digital media in the world and its constant evolution, parents have to take note on how digital media would affect their young children, and how it would influence their developmental skills, their creativity, and their interactions around them. According to a study of the Canadian Pediatric Society, an age-appropriate and well-designed children’s program with specific educational goals can provide an early language and literacy development for the children beginning about 2 years of age. They have found that interactive media that involves an adult can help children retain taught information, and they have concluded that these actions could teach the 2-year-old child due to the parent’s responsiveness and the age appropriate digital content.

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Meanwhile, a blog from Carepoint Academy informs the importance of storytelling to children. Through storytelling, it would help promote the child’s cognitive growth and development. The blog emphasized that storytelling helps children be taught moral values, be introduced to new ideas, promote a more creative way of thinking, help in developing their language skills, build up emotional intelligence, foster the child to have a love of reading, as well as making things more fun for the children to engage with. According to the blog, developing a child’s moral values helps them be able to develop a good sense of empathy for other people, and be able to learn on how to properly resolve conflicts effectively.

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With the common usage of digital devices, and the significant use of digital media, it is easy to implement and combine the effects of storytelling with digital media. There are a lot of children’s content situated in digital media, and there is no lack of it in the storytelling scene. With such easy access to stories through digital media, it would be easier to help teach children essential skills such as having a better grasp of emotional language or have an early language or literacy development. Although at the start, the media that the parents would show would most probably be that to occupy or distract their children, but over time, as they get older, parents would have more options to choose in terms of both entertaining the children as well as have that piece of children’s digital media have lessons and teachings that their children could experience and learn from.

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Overall, there are a multitude of benefits when it comes to using digital children’s media, be it for babysitting them or teaching them values and lessons. Although these benefits are great, it is still important to know that a child learns best from interacting with their parents or caregiver. Proper guidance and communication is needed between parents and children in order for the children to properly learn and develop as they get older. This point is especially more important when it comes to Filipino families. With Filipino families being family oriented, it is essential to have proper parent-child communication, as the parents are the ones who set rules and regulations on media usage. In conclusion, digital media for children can help them develop their language or literacy skills, and with the additional help of storytelling, children can learn important moral values as well as develop a good sense of social knowledge. And with the guidance of the parents, these lessons and information can be enhanced better.

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Sources:

• Canadian Pediatric Society – https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823000/
• Carepoint Academy – https://www.carepointeacademy.com/blog/posts/benefits-of-storytelling-for-kids